—and hands it over. Adding, as Jean-Guy mounts the steps behind him:
“But you may find very little as you remember it, from those days when M’sieu Dumouriez had the top floor.”
Jean-Guy pauses at the building’s door, favoring the lawyer with one brief, backwards glance. And returns—
“That, one may only hope . . . M’sieu.”
* * *
1793:
Jean-Guy wakes to twilight, to an empty street—that angry crowd which formerly assembled to rock and prison the Chevalier du Prendegrace’s escaping coach apparently having passed on to some further, more distant business. He lies sprawled on a pile of trash behind the butcher’s back door, head abuzz and stomach lurching; though whether the nausea in question results from his own physical weakness, the smell of the half-rotten mess of bones beneath him or the sound of the flies that cluster on their partially denuded surface, he truly cannot tell. But he wakes, also, to the voice of his best spy—the well-named La Hire—telling him he must open his eyes, lurch upright, rouse himself at last . . .
“May the Goddess of Reason herself strike me dead if we didn’t think you lost forever, Citizen—murdered, maybe, or even arrested. Like all the other Committee members.”
Much the same advice Jean-Guy remembers giving himself, not all so very long ago. Back when he lay enveloped in that dark red closeness between those drawn velvet curtains, caught and prone under the stale air’s weight in damnably soft, firm grip of the Chevalier’s upholstery.
But: “Citizen Sansterre!” A slap across the jaw, jerking his too-heavy head sharply to the left. “Are you tranced? I said, we couldn’t find you.”
Well . . . you’ve found me now, though. Haven’t you—
—Citizen?
The Chevalier’s murmuring voice, reduced to an echo in Jean-Guy’s blood. His hidden stare, red-glass-masked, coming and going like heat lightning’s horizon-flash behind Jean-Guy’s aching eyes.
He shakes his head, still reeling from the sting of La Hire’s hand. Forces himself to form words, repeating:
“ . . . the Committee.”
“Gone, Citizen. Scattered to the winds.”
“Citizen . . . Robespierre?”
“Arrested, shot, jaw h
eld on with a bandage. He’ll kiss the Widow tomorrow—as will we, if we don’t fly this stinking city with the Devil’s own haste.”
Gaining a weak grip upon La Hire’s arm, Jean-Guy uses it to lever himself—shakily—upwards. His mouth feels swollen, lips and gums raw-abraded; new blood fresh and sticky at one corner, cud of old blood sour between his back teeth, at the painful root of his tongue. More blood pulls free as he rises, unsticking the left panel of his half-opened shirt from the nub of one nipple; as he takes a step forward, yet more blood still is found gluing him fast to his own breeches, stiff and brown, in that—
. . . unmentionable area . . .
And on one wrist, a light, crescent-shaped wound—bruised and inflamed, pink with half-healed infection. A painfully raised testimony to dream-dim memory: The Chevalier’s rough little tongue pressed hard, cold as a dead cat’s, against the thin skin above the uppermost vein.
I have set my mark upon you, Citizen.
Jean-Guy passes a hand across his brow, coughing, then brings it away wet—and red. Squints down, and finds himself inspecting a palm-full of blood-tinged sweat.
“Dumouriez,” he asks La Hire, with difficulty. “Taken . . . also?”
“Hours ago.”
“Show me . . . to his room.”
* * *
And now, a momentary disclaimer: Let it be here stated, with as much clarity as possible, that Jean-Guy had never—hitherto—given much credence to those old wives’ tales which held that aristos glutted their delicate hungers at the mob’s expense, keeping themselves literally fat with infusions of carnal misery and poor men’s meat. Pure rhetoric, surely; folk-tales turned metaphor, as quoted in Camille Desmoulins’ incendiary pamphlets: “Church and nobility—vampires. Observe the color of their faces, and the pallor of your own.”
Not that the Chevalier du Prendgrace’s face, so imperfectly recalled, had borne even the slightest hint of color . . . healthy, or otherwise.